So I'm in Las Vegas for a conference, staying in one of
the swanky hotel-casinos, perpetual nighttime, flashing lights, bells and
buzzers, erotica that's not erotic, manufactured enticement. Fear and loathing,
straight up.
It is about
10:30 on a Saturday night, and I'm getting a cab from a restaurant in one hotel
on the Strip back to my hotel. The scene is controlled mayhem. People from
everywhere, it seems, are streaming in and out, many with drinks, "after
five" attire to bermuda shorts. Groups of young women in stiletto heels
are getting into two Hummer stretch limos heading to bachelorette parties. Men
in hotel uniforms bark commands and blow whistles, directing a swirl of
traffic, cabs and town cars and those steroidal Hummers. The whole vehicular
cluster is drenched in testosterone.
The next cab
in line is a small one, my cab. I slide in, relieved to be out of this mess. My
cabbie is a slight woman, weathered face, mid-to-late 40s, looks to be from
Central Asia. She is soft-spoken and cordial and talks to me with a
quarter-turn of her head, keeping both hands on the wheel. The larger cars are
unforgiving as we circle toward the exit, and she navigates carefully,
defensively. Once out on the Strip, which is moving at a crawl, I start up a
conversation.
At first,
given her pronunciation and limited vocabulary, I think she might be a fairly
new arrival to the States, but it turns out that she has lived in Las Vegas for
25 years, working most of the time in the restaurant industry. She's only been
driving a cab for six months. I ask her how she likes the new work, and her
answer leads to another question or two, and here's what emerges.
There was a
lot of stress in the restaurant business, she says: the managers, the
customers, complaints about the food. Driving a cab has less of that. You're
more on your own – though there's stress here too, she adds. She keeps
both hands on the wheel the entire time, eyes on the road. When we approach a
yellow light, her fellow cabbies gun it, but she stops, explaining that if she
gets in an accident, she could lose her job. Somewhere in this flow of
conversation, she repeats – with a little apologetic laugh at the
contradiction – that there's less stress driving a cab than in the
restaurant, but that there's stress here too. A different kind of stress, I
ask? Yes, she says, a different kind of stress.
As we speak,
her vocabulary increases markedly, and we end up talking about the economy in
Las Vegas, the terrible housing bubble, how it devastated so many, the recession,
the slow, slow comeback. All the while, we're surrounded by a creeping stream
of revellers, honking, yelling from car windows, booze, the lights,
lights, lights.
***
I thought
about that short ride off and on all the next day: Both hands on the wheel, the
slight turn of her head, the unfolding, semantically and syntactically
elaborated conversation about making a living in Las Vegas. I assumed my driver
was new to the country, that her English was pretty limited. But as is always
the case when people feel just a little more comfortable, so much can open up.
I was familiar with her contradictory attitudes about work from my mother and
so many other blue-collar and service workers – her parsing of different
kinds of stress, and her relief to have new work that, however, kept both of
her hands tight on the wheel.
A former
student of mine is a union organizer in Las Vegas, and he pointed out to me
that cab drivers, as independent contractors in a Right to Work state like
Nevada, have virtually no protections. It is possible that when she worked in
the restaurant industry, she was a member of the Culinary Workers Union, the
largest union in the city. If so, she gave up whatever protection she might
have had for work that, in some ways, creates less stress for her.
One
other factor in this job change is gender. I didn't see another woman cab
driver in the loud flow of vehicles through the hotel roundabout. The next day
I was telling the cabbie's story to a friend I had made in Vegas, someone who
until recently had worked in the casinos, and she said it was very unusual to
have a woman driving at night, for there have been some robberies, and one
cabbie was murdered. So my driver was fighting the odds on several levels, trying
to make a living catering to people like me. She had to choose between one
stressful job over another, the better option exposing her to danger, threading
her way through a bad economy, laying low, not taking any chances, being
cordial to people who rush into her city for short bursts of pleasure, many of
whom barely notice her, part of the vulnerable, semi-visible human machinery
that animates a strip of illusions in the desert.
